Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - Viking Sexuality

Episode Date: March 15, 2024

The Vikings have a fair claim to being the most overly-eroticised group of people in history. It's fair to say this is somewhat reductive.What forms did sexuality take in Viking society? How was magic a part of their understandings of sexuality? And what were their attitudes to sexual violence?Joining Kate today to tell us more is Marianne Hem Eriksen, Associate Professor of Archaeology at Leicester University. Marianne is also leader of Body Politics, a research project which is looking at, amongst other things, sexuality in the Viking Ages.This episode was edited by Tom Delargy. The producer was Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code BETWIXT sign up at https://historyhit/subscription/You can take part in our listener survey here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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wherever it is that you get your podcasts. I know this is a tired line, but it really does actually help us out a lot. Thank you very much, and on with the show. Locals are gathering cautiously in the heart of an ancient Scandinavian farmstead, round about 800 AD. A wind gathers and the trees begin to creak and sway. A hooded woman sits in the centre of a group of other women. Her face lit by torchlight as she holds an elaborately engraved staff.

She is a cirrus, a sorcerer known as a vulvar. The vulvar is a pre-divor. to the medieval witch, and she was a central part of ancient Viking society. And this evening, she's here to practice Sither, which is a form of magic that tries to predict the future. The vulva was a sacred figure in Viking society, and everything they did was highly gendered, the magic that they practiced, the ceremonies that they had, the people they gathered around them. It was all associated with magical women. So much so that in not Norse mythology, the god Odin, was taunted by Loki for leading a Seither ritual.

He still went, though. We know that questions were raised around the sexuality and gender of the real human men who were practicing Seither, even though Odin himself was a fan. Now, as the ceremony begins in earnest, the volwa enters a trance-like state in search of answers from the Norns, the Viking goddesses of fate. Want to find out more about this? Well, I certainly do. Let's do it.

What do you look for a man? Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs by just turning it up and pushing the funny. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, my beautiful time. Goodness has nothing to do with it, Derry. Hello, and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society with me, Kate Lister.

I'm sure, like many of you listening, The Viking Age, is one of my favorite periods in history. I mean, I love the actual, the proper real history bid, but it's also because they're often portrayed as incredibly beautiful, half-naked, stripped to the waist whenever they're on the big screen. And I don't know if anyone's actually tried to read some Viking erotica. I can't vouch for the historical accuracy, but I can promise you it'll be a few hours well spent. But moving beyond the sexy, beautiful stereotypes lies a fascinating history, particularly when it comes to sexuality in Viking society.

Joining me today is Marianne Hem Erickson, Associate Professor of Archaeology at Leicester University, and leader of body politics, a research project which is looking, amongst other things, at sexuality in the Viking Age. Why is the term Viking itself potentially problematic? How are gender norms shaped during the time? And what examples of joy can we find in Viking sexual practices? More than you'd think. I am ready to do this if you are betwixters,

Let's go. Hello and welcome to Betwicks the Sheets. It's only Marianne Hem Erickson. How are you doing? I am really well. I'm excited to be here. I am super excited you're here because this has got to be one of my most favorite topics. Sexy Vikings.

I say that as like a joke, sexy Vikings, but they do have a sexy reputation. We have very much eroticized this group of people. It's like part and parcel of. of this strange Viking mythology, isn't it? Yeah, I agree with that. I often say, you know, this is one of the most popular and romanticized periods of prehistory or history. The Vikings are so prevalent in popular culture. And I understand what you say about sexy Vikings because there are all these television shows

with the hairdoes and the braids and the guyliner, right? And my students once point me in the direction of a line of Viking erotica, but there's a whole subgenre of erotic fiction dedicated to the Vikings. I'm not surprised by that. I'm sure you'll find many self-published books on Amazon about sexy Vikings. Very good to curl up with it if it's, you know, a stormy night outside. Just say it. It could be.

I think my point about, you know, this being such a popular and kind of stereotyped period is also that it takes away some of the complexity and nuance of the people as well. They become kind of caricatures. What I like to do in my research is try to add that depth and complexity and make the Vikings a bit strange and weird because they were really strange and weird. What's it like being an archaeologist, focusing particularly on the Vikings,

when you're surrounded by the weight of this myth in popular culture, can you, like, resist it now and just go, no, leave it alone, you don't need to talk about us on social media, or does it still really get to you when you see the Vikings being misrepresented? Yeah, it's a great question. I think it still irritates me a little bit to some extent, and I find that I can very rarely watch any content that's based on the Viking Age

or read about it in the kind of all my free time because it's work for me, right? And it opens all these associations for me. I can watch a television show and I know, oh, that's that burial that they've based this on. And oh, I know who wrote that article. And so it's not really relaxing for me in that. Oh, I suppose it wouldn't be, would it? Should we start with a really basic question? But it would be a useful one?

Who were the Vikings? Like what kind of? date are we looking at? Because that's part of this myth of like Vikings. Like they almost, they don't have a date. They don't have a place. They're just these cartoon characters. But they were real. They were very real people. Where were they living and what time are we talking about? So the Vikings, and we'll return to that term, the Vikings, because that's part of the little puzzle and conundrum here. But for brief, let's just say the Vikings were the people who lived in the Scandinavian homeland. So that's Norway, Sweden and Denmark from about, let's say, 750 to 1050 AD.

and they very famously traveled far and wide in Europe and beyond, including to the British Isles and Ireland and places close to where we are, but also a much further field, including Iceland, Greenland, and then onto North America and into the east through the river systems of Russia, to the Black Sea and to Istanbul, what is now Istanbul, and perhaps beyond. The term Viking is much debated, and some people are arguing at the minute that we should really use it as a term. at all. So the literary people and language people can't quite pinpoint what the etymology is. Is it

connected to a particular geographical area of Norway called Wikin, which was a kind of Viking homeland? Or is it related to a verb to go Viking and meaning it is to travel abroad and to do the raiding and the pillaging and the trading and all these activities that we associate with the Vikings? And so is it an activity? Is it a profession? And, you know, when you start unpacking the term like that, it also opens questions like, were children, Vikings? What about women and being a Viking, depending on how you define it? What about the Sami, who are the indigenous populations in the far north of the Scandinavian peninsula? How do they fit in to that idea of the Viking? So it's contested at the minute. People suggest calling them the Norsemen, which A, is obviously a gendered

Androcentric concept. So I don't think that really solves any of our issues. Do we call them Northerners? Do we call them early Scandinavians? So I just continue to call them the Vikings. But by that, I'm encompassing all of the populations and all of the social groups of that time and by kind of problematizing and discussing what I mean as I'm doing now. Wow. I'd no idea the term was being so contested. The time period is interesting. What is it that happens around about, was it the 8th century that has made people go, This is where the Vikings started. And who was in Scandinavia before them?

Surely they can't have been the case that it was an entirely different group of people and they just traded out and went, oh, we're Vikings now? Like, how did that work? So the Vikings are the kind of direct descendants of the people who were in Scandinavia previously in what we call the Scandinavian Iron Age, which lasts longer in Scandinavia than it does, for instance, in Britain because we were never invaded by the Romans. So while in this country, you have an Iron Age. that abruptly stops with the Roman invasion.

Our RNA just kind of continues throughout the centuries after year 1 AD, because the Romans never got that far north. So they are kind of the direct descendants of people who have already been there. Obviously, people have always traveled, and there have been multiple waves of migration into the north of Europe as in other European areas. But I think that's a story for another podcast. What happened in the 8th century?

Well, that's a really classic question. Some of the conventional and traditional and quite, I think, dated explanations are about how these Scandinavians had such superior ship technology, that that enabled them to travel very far. But I wonder if that's not putting the cart before the horse a little bit. I don't think just because you have the technology to travel, that can necessarily explain that kind of explosion of raids and violence, but also settlement and trade and travel

and that kind of fatalist ideology that they were driven by. So ship technology is part of it, but I'm not sure that can be kind of the monocons. explanation. Some have suggested that they had silver fever and were so preoccupied with silver and treasure and precious things. And yeah, surely they were cunning and they had financial motives as well, but I think that's also a bit reductive in a way. There are explanations going on that there's a demographic challenge, that there are more men than women. So the men need to occupy themselves with something. I think the short answer is there's not going to be one reason for this, but I think rather

than these kind of monocausal and functionalist explanations, it's interesting to think about power and it's interesting to think about complexity. It's interesting to think about worldviews and religion as well. And they certainly made an impression over here. It's like this lightning bolt when Lindisfan is attacked. I mean, it must have been the Saxon equivalent of 9-11. It's to have a monastery attacked and raided by these people you never saw coming, you don't know who they are. I was going to say they're really tough, but I don't know if that's true, actually. Maybe you can tell me about that one. But it was a huge event, wasn't it? It really was. And it's been suggested that maybe something that made it even more scary was that they were very foreign and very different,

but not that different. Because obviously the Anglo-Saxons had been part of a kind of shared Northern European Germanic cultural group. And so they'd also believed in Vodon, which is the equivalent of Odin, right? And just some generations before, because obviously the Anglo-Saxons were converted to Christianity in between there, but it's been suggested that, yes, they're very strange, they're very foreign, but in terms of dress and jewelry styles and even in language, because old English and Old Norse were not really that different from one another, something that may have added to the eeriness surrounding them was that they were like an echo of something a little bit familiar. Yes. Like it was the fact that they attacked the monastery as well, wasn't it,

which was this very hallowed, very revered, and they killed monks. It's just the horror that that created, I think it's still ripple into this very day. You can certainly feel it when you're reading in the accounts. It was it Beads account when he's talking about it? He's not a fan of the Vikings, is he? And I think that's back to the Vikings being a little bit cunning and a bit strategic. And obviously where worldviews come into this very much, because for the Vikings who were, you know, not Christian at the time, and they had their own gods and their own way of seeing the world, this wasn't hallow ground at all. It was a lot of treasure protected very, very badly or poorly, right? So it's ripe for the picking, as it were. Let's talk about Viking sexuality, because I'm

endlessly fascinated by this, because how do you push past all the myth and all the kind of the superstition, all the nonsense, and really try to unpick what was sex and relationships and, dare I say, romance like within this culture? What are the evidence that you're working with? So I should say that I'm running a research project at the minute, which is funded by the European Research Council called Body Politics, Personhood, Sexuality and Death in the Iron and Viking Ages, where we're studying exactly the kinds of questions, we're thinking about now, starting with the body, right? So we're trying to tell a story about these huge historical and social events and the raids

and these conventional narratives, but rather than telling them from the top down and starting with the warriors and the kings and the nation states, we want to start with the body and body concepts and people's private lives, as it were. And I'm using scarecrows for private here, because as the good kind of 1970s, second wave feminist, I believe that the private is always political. And so we're trying to think about exactly these kinds of questions in a political slant. And we want to study something like sexuality, which is a part of this research project, so far into the past, it is challenging. We don't have time machines.

We're never going to find that capital T truth, that one true story. But we piece together different forms of evidence. So being an archaeologist, I focus on material culture and how people lived in their houses and their burials and how they treated they're dead, but because I work in a period where we also have a few contemporary written sources, and then a few later written sources, the medieval saga material, the poetry, the eddas, etc. You kind of try and piece together evidence from different source categories and see what kind of stories you can tell. If the question is, you know, can I give a broad overview of sex and romance and relationships in these periods? It's a really big question. I think I'll start by saying that

marriage was a political institution as much as anything else. So for a lot of people, they didn't necessarily have that much say about who to marry, as we know, for many other times and places in history. So it was seen as a kind of transactional thing between families and often it was regulated through other motivations, like who had a neighboring farm or who were you an ally with, etc. I'm among the scholars who think we are working with a relatively patriarchal society at this point, but that doesn't mean that there aren't individuals who transgress and show resilience and resistance and have chosen other paths. But in general terms, I don't think it was a very gender equal society at all. And so romance, I'm not so sure of really. Although, of course, people had the capacity and would have

fallen in love and had all these emotions that we do. But how routinely that would be expressed in institutions of marriage, we really don't know. Extramarital affairs, if we can call it that, were slightly frowned upon, but mostly accepted and at least for men. Although in the saga material, there are also some women who take lovers as well. So, you know, it could happen. But the men seem to have more sexual freedom than women. And some of them would take second wives or concubines or exploit enslaved populations as kind of household slaves. It's really dark and horrible. And we can return to that if we want to. But in general terms, sexuality is just really rich and fascinating topic. So that's the kind of the big gloss of how this worked. But then it's a really

interesting topic because obviously sex is, as you know very well, and I've written a great book about it intersects with so many other things in society. It's not something that just happens between two individuals and it's not something that's private necessarily. But it explodes into these ideas about gender, about power, about kinship, about friendship, about humor. And in the Viking Age, we have some really tantalizing pieces of evidence that can tell stories about how sex was central in magic, for instance, but also how some people were able to resist some of these really oppressive sexual structures. It was interesting there to hear you talk about the Viking Age as a deeply patriarchal society, because one thing that I've noticed in the scholarship, actually,

might not be the scholarship, it might be more TV representations in popular culture, is we're kind of gravitating slowly to make this argument that Viking women, were really emancipated and it was a super feminist place and that women could keep their own name and they could get divorced when they wanted to. And that's sort of one of those points as a historian. You don't want to go, oh, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, because you want that to be true. But it's not quite true, is it? We've got to be very careful with this stuff. Yeah, you're breaking my heart there a little bit because, of course, as a radical feminist, I wish that I could sit and say that women were so emancipated. And there are people who, you can find

those arguments in scholarship, because obviously one of the great things. about academic research is that we don't all agree and we debate these things. But I happen to be among the people who think that, yes, although both men and women could request divorce, for instance, you know, there were very specific circumstances under which you could request divorce. And yes, things like domestic violence was one of them. But for instance, if you actually look at those legal codes, one of the requirements from one of the early medieval laws about domestic violence being grounds for divorce is that it had to have

happened three times in public to a degree where there were open wounds. And so while I'm very glad that women had the right for divorce under those circumstances, I don't think that means that domestic violence in other forms and milder forms than those that would lead to open wounds in public didn't occur. It's a really complex issue. And I think one of my pet peeves in this particular area is that, A, people want to equate modern-day Scandinavian gender equality with the past. They want to create this continuous line from the Viking Age to, you know, the Scandinavian countries famously being very gender equal today. And I think that's not quite true. That's a political agenda rather than anything else. But to my other little pet peeve there is that when people talk about women in the

Viking Age, they're basing that research and those interpretations, mostly on the women of the sagas, who are already a kind of selective group. There were the stories of the elites that were written, down. And so it's not the stories necessarily of the enslaved populations or the lower classes. And the other form of evidence is the furnished burial. So that's the burials with the richest grave goods and the most bling in them, the most stuff in them. And again, you know, we think that maybe as much as half of the population of the Vikings didn't even receive a form of burial that we can recognize archaeologically. So people talk about gender systems of the Viking Age, but what they mean is the rights and privileges of the elite women. And once you know that there is this entire

undercurrent of regular people, lower status people, but also enslaved people, I think that those stories are really important to tell there as well. I'll be back with Marianne after this short break. The Vikings are definitely viewed as quite strict in their gender roles. You have manly men and you have women who might be warriors as well, but you know, they're still quite womanly. What I like about your work is you're trying to sort of mess that up a bit, like get in there and create some space for maybe there's some queer readings of this. Maybe it's not as binary as people assume that it is. What would you say about that aspect of Viking culture and life? Absolutely. I'm not by far the only one who asks these questions I should hasten to add and tries to mess up these categories a little bit.

Again, I think that broadly, there was a kind of broad binary gender system in place, because since we have so much textual evidence as well, you know, we can argue that there were things like men's names and women's names and from the archaeological material. Some objects seem associated with either gender, but as lots of really good archaeological work in recent years has shown, a lot of types of artefact that point to specific activities, right? So like agricultural work, for instance, which is like, long been assumed to be then a very male domain. Those kinds of artifacts actually crop up in all

burials or a large proportion of burials, no matter gender. So perhaps we shouldn't think about the world in these black and white kind of categories and spheres of influence where, you know, men are outside and women are staying in the house doing household chores. But the opposite is true as well. So without going into too much detail, keys have long been seen as a kind of a symbol of the housewife power and housewife position in Viking society, partly based on the written sources again, but a study by a colleague of mine from Norway show that keys also crop up in men's burials, as much as they do in women's burial. So these ideas about these separate domains and these strict rules in everyday life, I don't think that was possible at all. I think daily life was much

messier. We know that the world is messy and complex. And then, of course, you mentioned warrior women, and there's this famous burial from Birka from a few years ago where this person, this individual, buried with a full weapon set. Had long since it had been suggested to be female, by the way, based on the bones, based on the osteological material. But it was only when the ancient DNA analysis found that, in fact, this was biologically a female person, that people were willing to accept that a woman could even be buried with a full

weapon set. And I mean, the explanations before then, even based on the osteological indication that this was a woman, went along the lines of they must have lost some of the bones, they must have mixed up the bones, or there must have been a male body in the grave, but that body is mysteriously decomposed while the female body survived. It must originally been a double burial, because there is no way. We can't envisage any way a woman was buried with weapons. And so I think there is so much evidence staring us in the face that these binary systems really didn't work out in the way.

that we would expect, although I probably think there was a binary system in place. However, you asked about queerness and I just took us on another journey there, but... No, when you started talking about the famous burial, I was just about to, please, please don't tell me that it's not true. I need that for some reason. I'm so glad that really is true. It really was a woman who was buried with this stuff. But please, keep going. Tell us about gay Vikings, because I love that idea. Yes. So again, I might have to disappoint in some ways in that I also wish that I could say that women were strong and everyone was happy. I can't really say that. Obviously, as in any place and time through history, there were gay people, there were queer people.

It was like in many places there was something interesting about taking the passive role in intercourse. Is that always the way? It's like whoever is quote unquote the girl. It's so weird that. You see that cropping up all over the place. I think there's something really interesting and eerie and fascinating about the fact that there seems to be a relatively widespread idea about allowing your body to be penetrated

to meaning that you are the passive party and somehow you're the inferior party. And so that seems to be the case in the Viking Age as well. And so to be the active party in, for instance, then kind of a homosexual intercourse, that would be fine. But to be

the one that allows themselves to be penetrated, that means that it's shame, and it's effeminate and these kinds of things. What's really interesting about that is that it intersects with this really famous form of Viking magic called Saither. So Saither is a form of magic work where women in particular

could see the future, could cast spells, could take revenge. You know, it's magic. It's a form of magic work. It's really interesting. But it has some sexual connotations that we don't quite understand. So some researchers have indicated or suggested

that as part of this magical ritual practice, which involved staffs and the staff is seen as a kind of symbol of being a vulva sorceress, that part of that had a kind of connotation or even a practice related to penetration or a kind of sexual practice. I mean, we have no evidence for that. So it's a bit speculative. But it's kind of thinking about all this association. with the staff and looking at the words and that sort of thing. Whatever it was, somehow it was seen as there was some kind of sexual energy embedded in this magic work and it was seen as women's domain and therefore it was very shameful to do for men again because it somehow connects to this idea of argy and allowing yourself to be penetrated

or taking the passive role or whatever it might be. The paradox is that Odin, who's the king of all the gods, is the foremost of, of the gods in the Norse Pantheon. He's also the god of war, and by all means, should be this manly, macho kind of person. He is the foremost Saeeda de practitioner. He is the best at performing this kind of magic work. And that has led some people to ask, is he essentially a bit queer? Because that should make him effeminate and all of these things.

But he doesn't seem to be any less revered because of that, although he gets, you know, called out on it from time to time by particularly Loki, this trickster figure in the Norse pantheon in the myths. But there is an interesting paradox there. And Odin also has all these other shamanic qualities. So he is able to transform his body into animal form

and into a bird so that it can fly and see across the world. So there's this idea about transformation and being in between and being fluid that may also encompass gender fluidity then. How do you think that they're square in that circle? If like in some of the sources

are saying that this type of magic is girl magic, it's just for girls, they're doing weird girl stuff, but there's Odin. And he's like, yeah, well, I'm the king of all the sexy magic. It's so strange, that state of cognitive dissidents. There's another saga story as well. I'm afraid I can't remember, not being an historian, I can't remember it off the top of my head,

but where one of the Viking Kings has several men executioned, really, by tying them to an outcrop rock, in the ocean and letting them drown. And that's because they were Saithr men. They were men who practiced this form of Saith. So he has a whole bunch of men executed on that reason. And whether or not that's an historical episode or a literary kind of motif, at least that means that in the Zeit kind of the time,

there was an idea that some men were still practicing this, even though it was seen as shameful in the Norse religion. And then with the incoming of Christianity, it becomes even more problematic because it's also practicing un-Christian, heretic magic. Do we have any idea what this, so you pronounced that so beautiful, was it Sidiya, the magic?

Saither, yeah. Sider. What was that? What on earth were they doing? Do we have any idea? Is it just one of those mysterious, they were doing something, we don't know what it was? There are a few narrative episodes

and there's a few tidbits of archaeological material. So some of the narrative episodes describe women who are often then a bit marginal in society. They seem to be revered and powerful, but also kind of on the margins of accepted sociality. One of the episodes from it's the saga of Eric the Red

describes this woman in detail, including what she's wearing. So she's wearing, I can't remember, like a lamb skin hat and gloves made of white cat fur. And it's all very detailed and invoking all these animal bodies as well and skins. And she's seated on some sort of seat. and they sing a specific type of song or spell called Galdr,

and then she's able to foretell about the future. So there are these kinds of little episodes. Interestingly, some of this magic also seems to involve kind of sexualized spells. There's particular runes that seem to be able to be carved to cast spells that will make people in extreme lust and give them burning, with some sort of association with genital burning. of those kinds of really interesting ideas, unbearable sexual need,

like those kinds of interesting associations. From the archaeological material, there's some women's burials that are very convincingly, I think, been interpreted to perhaps be of these saitha practitioners, these volur, this is the plural for sorceress.

One of them from Denmark is very famous. This woman was found with a lot of interesting and exotic artefacts. So she had artifacts that were coming all the way from the Black Sea. She had toe rings as far as I remember. She had little amulets, including amulets of little birds' feet and wings, which may, again, be a little bit connected with this idea of human animal shape-shifting

and being able to take on flight and shamanistic travel. She also had owl pellets of owl bones, a bird bones in the burial. And then there was a box brooch, a type of jewelry, but which is also a container. And in there they found lead. paint, which they wonder whether it was used to put on makeup or paint her face or her body as she was preparing for ritual. And then they found hundreds of henbane seeds. And henbane is a psychoactive plant. So there's a question of whether these kinds of rituals also included forms of intoxication. Wow. I'd no idea what that woman got up to. But there's some stories there,

aren't there? Oh my goodness. One of the things that you're trying to do, and I think this is amazing, is that as you rightly pointed out earlier, so much of what we know about the Viking time and period, it's very rich people, high-class people, people that made it into the sagas, people that could write the sagas, rich burials of people. How are you going about reclaiming the experience of your everyday person and enslaved people? Because we often forget that bit about the Vikings, as this was a people who practiced slavery. How did you go about reclaiming their voices and experiences? As an archaeologist, it's difficult in terms of material culture, because if you have a population that really doesn't have any personal property, are not necessarily buried in a way

that you can recognize, then they're not going to leave much material trace. So there's some burials where it's been suggested that, you know, you have multiple inhumations. We have more than one body in a burial essentially. And in some cases, one of those bodies will have been bound or decapitated. And so there are questions of was this an enslaved person or someone else who was a sacrifice and basically used as a grave good for another person in the burial. We don't quite know, but that's one possible explanation, of course. A lot of the evidence will then revert to written evidence, which, you know, source critique and a pinch of salt and all of that. And but we also have, in addition to the medieval sagas and stories that, you know, the, the successors of the Vikings wrote about their recent past because those sagas were written in the 12th and 13th and 14th century.

So effectively after the Viking Age took place. But in addition to those later medieval sources, you also have contemporary historical sources from places where the Vikings traveled to. So, you know, you have annals from Ulster, for instance, saying that the heathens came and a lot of women were carried. away. You have sources from the Arabic caliphate explaining in really heartbreaking terms sometimes how these swaths of foreigners and heathens come in and they take all the women and they take the children including the boys. So I think there's enough of these contemporary stories to suggest that yes, this is a historical reality. Another way in is to look obviously at genetic material. One thing I think is really undercommunicated is, for instance, they did studies of the modern genetic populations of Iceland.

So Iceland was uninhabited until the Viking Age and then it was settled from Norway primarily. And when they trace the modern genomes there, they found that the genetic supported the sagas, at least for the men. So the men seemed to primarily have genetic ancestry that matched to today's Norway, Western coast of Norway in particular. but the women had a very high proportion of Gaelic and Celtic DNA. And I think when those genetic studies came out at the time, this was the early 2000s, that was kind of presented as a fun story. And I think there could be all kinds of stories in there because the past isn't one thing and no society is one thing.

And the world is messy, as I said earlier. But I think we also have to open the minds combined with the historical contemporary sources that actually a lot of women in particular didn't really have much choice did they in where they ended up. But a story I like to tell in this context, so I will if we have the time for it. Oh, please. It's from the sagas. There's a woman who is tested in two different sagas. Her name was Melkorka, or at least that's the old Norse name they give her. And according to these sources, she was of Irish royalty. She was a daughter of the Irish king at the time, but she'd been captured by Vikings at about the age of 15, I think. And she ended up in a

trading booth in Sweden on an island outside of Gothenburg. And a man comes into this trading booth. And, you know, it's even described how the curtain is pulled away and he sees all these women sitting there. I mean, it's really harrowing. It's really harrowing when you start thinking about it. And his name is Hoskul and he's in Icelander. And he ends up buying her despite the fact that she is mute. She doesn't speak. She travels with him or he brings her to Iceland. I mean, the saga even laconically says he bought her. and then he lay with her that night. So there's no doubt about what's going on there.

And then he brings her to Iceland and installs her in his household. He already has a wife, so he's taking her as a concubine of sorts. However, we're going to gloss that. What's interesting, though, is they all believe she's mute, but it turns out that's actually an act of resistance and resilience in her.

After she bears him a child, like five years later, he realizes that she's speaking Irish with the child, and she could speak all along, but she is chosen as one of the only ways she could have any resistance and resilience. She's chosen not to speak. That's been her choice. She also has a more active form of resistance where she punches his wife in the face, so she bleeds when she is mistreated.

So this is a very strong character. And in the end, she is able to marry someone else. She's kind of more or less released from the concubineage or leaves the concubineage, and she marries someone else. And through that marriage, she's able to raise money. And she spends that money.

She stakes out a future for herself, basically, and she spends that money sending her son, Baish Gould, her captor, back to Ireland so he can seek out the Irish family and meets the grandfather, etc. And they want him to stay and become a royalty there. But in the end, he chooses to go back to Norway and Iceland. But for Melkorka herself, she's never able to return,

but at least she is able to send her son there. and then ultimately it's described that she's buried in a mound with her then husband when she dies. And that is something that, again, is for the elites of society. So she's been on this journey where in the end she's kind of incorporated into the social fabric of medieval Iceland. How did they conceive of sexual violence and sexual assault? Because that's the history of sexual violence. It's fascinating. And I think it's true to say that almost every culture understood it was.

was wrong, but what they defined as sexual violence varies wildly. What about the Vikings? I mean, just listening to that story to just write it out, oh, he bought her and he lay with her, so it was all fine then. It's quite jarring to hear. What was their understanding of sexual violence and sexual assault? Again, a really fascinating question, and I see how in scholarship this has been treated really, really differently. So, yes, there were legislation in the medieval laws against race, and it's been pointed out that it was seen almost as severe as murder. So, you know, that's been the kind of the positive and story that's been told. However, in more recent scholarship, people have pointed out that actually it depends on who's

being raped because enslaved people, for instance, there's a legal paragraph saying something along the lines of if a man gets another man slave pregnant, he is responsible for her until she's strong enough where she can carry two buckets of water. And I read that paragraph not to mean that it's about care for her. It's about the lost labor when she can't work. She can't do the house sold work. She can't carry the water buckets that she's supposed to. And so, you know, you have to basically pay reparations to the owner.

In fact, is how I read that paragraph. And it's also been pointed out that in the cases where high status women are sexually assaulted, then that is very severe. But A, the shame would follow them to the victims, not. only the perpetrators. And B, it's been pointed out that part of the shame there is because it's dishonoring the husbands or the fathers rather than it's about her bodily integrity and her freedom. So again, complex. Complex. There was the 10th century writer Ibn Phelan, who writes about the famous pecan bail everyone knows about with the ship being set on fire

and floating off. And he says that a slave girl was put on that ship alive to be burnt to death with her master's body. That doesn't sound too egalitarian. What's your take on that? It's a really, again, really harrowing story. It's actually fascinating. It's absolutely fascinating. And a lot of detail, I will give it a brief gloss here.

But basically, even Fadlana is a diplomat from the Arabic caliphate and he travels around the river Volga. And he meets this group of what we think were Swedish Vikings. And he's observing their customs and their culture. He notes, for instance, that they often have sex with their female slaves in full public view. While everyone can look on, they seem to not have really a conceptualization of privacy in that matter,

or maybe only when it's slave women rather than their actual legal wives. Who knows? While he's there, one of their chieftains dies, and as he has died, they kind of gather up all the people and say, particularly the slaves, and say, who among you will die with him? Who among you will sacrifice yourself for him? burial and one young woman or girl freely says I will and from that moment her status really shifts

she's treated really differently she's given bracelets and jewelry two women kind of serve her and you know wash her and that sort of thing but at the same time she also is expected to go from pavilion to pavilion from tent to tent and sleep with all the men they've performed all kinds of elaborate rituals and I wish I could go into detail because there's so much interesting happening there including allowing her doing some rituals that allows her to see into another world so there might be some connections with saitha and female magic again here we're not quite sure but at the end after 10 days have gone the moment comes they give her alcohol and perhaps that alcohol is also spiked with something else in other psychoactive because it's described that she's quite befuddled

and confused and they've pulled a ship onto land and and the men are standing on the deck and they are pounding the shields with stick. So it's like drumming, right? This really rhythmic and kind of ritualistic noise is how it's described. But it says it's also to cover her screams so that other people won't be afraid

to sacrifice themselves in the future. And in the end, she is pulled into this burial chamber that they've built on the top of the ship by, again, a female ritual practitioner, or an old crone who's in charge of the entire ritual, it seems. So again, complexity and roles and power and oppression here. And this young woman is pulled into the burial chamber where, again, she's laid down next to the 10-day old corpse of the king.

It's described. We can only imagine the smells and the sensations of that. And then the men have sex with her slash rape her there next to this corpse in turn. And then ultimately she is both strangled and stabbed. to death by this old chrome. So it's a really fascinating and macabre, but also a really heartbreaking story that captures a lot of the things

that we've been talking about here, including things like, you know, the person in charge of this ritual is a woman. So some women obviously could have high status and have important roles in society. That doesn't mean that women as a monolithic block necessarily had equal rights or anything of the sorts. Marian, you have been so fascinating to talk to.

I'm going to ask you one final question because I feel that we've kind of painted a picture of it wasn't very much fun at all. It was really bleak and dark and magic and raping and all this stuff. What would you say are some things about Viking life and love and sexuality that you were pleasantly surprised by? Something that didn't make you go, oh, Jesus, they're doing it again. Something that made you go, yes, that, please, let's have my.

of that. I love that question. I think that's a great question. And it is really important to say that, although, you know, as a big part of my research agenda is to give voice to these people who haven't necessarily featured in those tales about strong men and kings and warriors and trade and economics and all that. And I want to tell the stories about people who are oppressed and exploited and at risk of violence. But I don't want to cast women or children as eternal victims and always as oppressed and all of these things. And one of the things I'm really interested at the minute in connection with this research project that I'm doing

is to think about sexuality not only in terms of exploitation and violence, but also as something that is joyful and affirmative and fun in people's lives and certainly also was that in the past. And I think it's interesting that, you know, when we think about sexuality in these periods and I think in other historical periods as well, often men's sexuality is reduced to aggression and violence, and women's sexuality is often just equated with reproduction, biology, and kinship and motherhood. So I'm interested in thinking about female sexuality in a broader and more positive light in particular.

And I think there are a couple of sources, and perhaps we only have time for one, but I think really tells that story very well. And one of them is a little obscure episode from a saga taking place in far north of Norway, where it's actually the first Christian king of Norway who comes to this farmstead in disguise. He's on a mission to convert the population to Christianity and he comes there in disguise with his men. And what he stumbles over is a little household that are doing a really interesting household ritual. So they've slaughtered the family horse, the farm horse. And when they did, they cut off and preserved the horse's penis. And they're now keeping the penis in a box wrapped in linen and with onion.

both of which apparently have preservative qualities, so can work as kind of natural preservatives. And in the evenings, they take this horse phallus and they pass it from household member to household member, each reciting a verse for it. And it states, over time, this fallace has become so strong that it can stand on its own. And it's the wife of the household who's leading this ritual.

The men are a bit more kind of cautious and perhaps not completely comfortable with it. And it's the enslaved woman who has the most kind of overt sexualized verse. And she says something along the lines of, if you and I were alone, I would not be able to refrain from thrusting him inside me in mutual pleasure. So it's really quite explicit and quite crude, but also really fun. There's indications there of lubrication and wetness and humor and desire in the way that obviously suggests that just as in any other time period, women could also be active sexual agents. And while this is an obscure episode and has to do with conversion to Christianity and heathen

them and all of that, it also tells you something about the concept of female sexuality, I think, as positive and active. You've been unbelievably amazing to talk to today. I've loved every second of this. Out of people who know more about you and your work and your research project, where can they find you? Well, we still have a Twitter account or X account, although I have to say might be leaving that platform. But either on Twitter or on Instagram, you can find us at Body Politics ERC, all in one word. I'm also on Twitter, Mare-H-E-R-I-E. And we have a website as well, I should say, which is bodypolitics.com, where you can also find links to all our social media. Maybe that's even easier.

Amazing. Thank you so much for coming to talk to us today. You have been a treat. Thank you. Thank you for listening and thank you so much to Mary Ann for joining me and if you like what you heard,

please don't forget to like, review and follow along wherever it is that you get your podcasts. If you'd like us to explore a subject or maybe you just fancied saying hi, then you can email us at betwixt at history hit.com. We've got episodes on everything

from queer sexuality than Jacoby and Britain to Abraham Lincoln's sex life all coming your way. This podcast was edited by Tom Delagie and produced by Stuart Beckwith, The senior producer was Charlotte Long. Join me again, Betwixt the Sheets,

The History of Sex Scandal in Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.